Think of Cheshire and you might conjure up images of cheese, a grinning cat, lush fields, quaint villages and rich celebrities.

But away from the chocolate box packaging, those of us who live in the county know we are also home to industry, including Britain’s oldest working mine dating back to 1844.

As a Yorkshire man, coal mining was part of my family history and background but rather than the black stuff, we are talking here about the white stuff in the form of rock salt used to de-ice roads across the UK every winter.

The importance of salt to the county over time is reflected in the names of many of Cheshire’s towns including Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich because ‘Wych’ often means brine town.

So I was excited on being offered the opportunity to go down Winsford Rock Salt Mine on a special visit where I discovered their particular salt is actually pink in colour because of the impurities.

A load of rock salt

Slightly unnerving was the safety briefing where we got kitted out with a hard hat, torch and an oxygen self rescuer in the event of fire. Reassuringly nobody had ever needed to break into the canister which features a mouthpiece and nose clip allowing you to breathe uncontaminated air in an emergency.

Soon we were travelling 600 feet down to the salt seam in a lift which opened out into what I can only describe as feeling like the caped crusader’s Bat Cave on a vast scale but with no sign of any super heroes or Alfred the butler.

Pillars are left in place to prop up the mine

Everything is held up by leaving literally pillars of salt, not a biblical reference, but a technique known as pillar and stall based on precise calculations. The deeper the depth and support required, the larger the pillars.

The go-to man and guide for the day was Gary Sinclair, the mine manager and a former Staffordshire coal miner, who drove our minibus around a network of underground roads in a mine with high ceilings and huge caverns.

It’s strange seeing vehicles, including heavy machinery, underground. Many of the 120-plus fleet had to be dismantled and then transported down one of the mine’s three shafts inside a 15 ton skip before being reassembled.

A layer of salt dust covers the ground wherever you look, which Gary says is great for killing weeds in your garden.

Fortunately, breathing in the salt particles, unlike coal dust, is not harmful to health as it dissolves in the lungs rather than getting lodged there forever.

On the subject of breathing, two ventilation fans, worth £500,000, ensure a flow of air at all times.

Gary explains that millions of pounds has been invested in the mine that keeps Britain moving in the depths of the harshest winters. Who are the customers?

He explained: “Local authorities, highways agencies, Highways England etc. They have their own stock pile which we supply.”

Gary jokingly confesses that he prays for a harsh winter as the 81 underground jobs depend on it – in total the workforce is double that number.

A particularly bad British winter in 2009 saw reserves almost run out as salt suppliers could not keep pace with demand at a time when councils did not keep their own stock piles.

Soon we are introduced to a monster-sized £3.2m rock cutting machine, a JOY 12HM36, named ‘Joy’ for short, operated by remote control and monitored in real time from a base in Derbyshire.

Rock cutting machine 'Joy'

Joy uses tungsten steel cutting picks fitted to a drum to claw away the rock salt. The excavated rock salt is collected underneath and passed through the machine to a conveyor system before being transported to the crushing and screening stations then lifted to the surface.

“We’ve changed,” he said. “It was a business that wasn’t exposed to change so you’d got entrenched mentalities and behaviours.”

A new area of exploration saw £9m investment, explained the mine manager, who said 1,000 tons of material can be extracted per shift with the aim of achieving an average of 1,800 tons.

“I feel exceptionally proud of what we’ve achieved and we did it with not one injury. We are moving tons and tons of equipment and we had nobody that got so much as a scratch,” he continued.

Documents being taken down Winsford Rock Salt Mine for safe storage.

“I said to the guys, ‘To do what you’re doing, to develop somewhere for the next 30 years of employment for somebody is something to be proud of’. It’s a legacy that most people don’t get the chance to leave behind.“

The other side of the business is secure archive storage by company Deep Store in abandoned workings. We didn’t have time to visit this section of the mine but we did see documents being loaded onto fork lift trucks underground.

Once back on the surface we were given lumps of salt as a memento of our trip and I suspect we also smuggled a pinch or two within our bodies as I could taste salt for a few hours following the visit.